Top 100 Martin Buber Quotes
#1. To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.
Martin Buber
#2. Read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made. Face the book with a new attitude as something new.
Martin Buber
#3. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now - or, as Buber puts it, in the present.
Martin Buber
#4. The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.
Martin Buber
#5. It was from Buber's other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.
Martin Buber
#6. When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth.
Martin Buber
#7. A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.
Martin Buber
#8. Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.
Martin Buber
#9. If we had the power over the ends of the earth, it would not give us that fulfillment of existence which a quiet devoted relationship to nearby life can give us.
Martin Buber
#10. In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.
Martin Buber
#11. I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.
Martin Buber
#12. Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveller is unaware.
Martin Buber
#13. So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.
Martin Buber
#14. On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.
Martin Buber
#15. Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.
Martin Buber
#16. Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.
Martin Buber
#17. What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him.
Martin Buber
#19. You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way
it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven
Martin Buber
#20. For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.
Martin Buber
#21. Feelings are 'entertained'; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.
Martin Buber
#23. There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands
Martin Buber
#24. The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.
Martin Buber
#26. The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.
Martin Buber
#27. How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you - for that is the meaning of your life.
Martin Buber
#28. One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake.
Martin Buber
#29. To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.
Martin Buber
#30. What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: this I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You.
Martin Buber
#31. I shall teach you the best way to say Torah. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, YOU must stop.
Martin Buber
#32. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being..
Martin Buber
#33. The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
Martin Buber
#34. Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.
Martin Buber
#36. There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit.
Martin Buber
#37. Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.
Martin Buber
#38. Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing
Martin Buber
#39. When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, 'Have faith and take your troubles to God.' Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help
only yourself.
Martin Buber
#40. The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.
Martin Buber
#41. The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning.
Martin Buber
#42. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.
Martin Buber
#43.
What, then, does one experience of the You?
Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.
What, then, does one know of the You?
Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.
Martin Buber
#45. One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.
Martin Buber
#46. To love God truly, one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow-man, you will know that he is lying.
Martin Buber
#47. The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion.
Martin Buber
#48. There is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.
Martin Buber
#49. God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.
Martin Buber
#50. Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.
Martin Buber
#51. The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
Martin Buber
#52. The fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises
Martin Buber
#53. The ones who count are those persons who - though they may be of little renown - respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.
Martin Buber
#54. The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
Martin Buber
#55. If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.
Martin Buber
#56. The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It.
Martin Buber
#58. Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.
Martin Buber
#59. The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.
Martin Buber
#60. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.
Martin Buber
#61. We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.
Martin Buber
#62. Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.
Martin Buber
#63. Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
Martin Buber
#64. I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
Martin Buber
#65. Human life and humanity come into being in genuine encounters. The hope for this hour depends upon the renewal of the immediacy of dialogue among human beings.
Martin Buber
#66. Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.
Martin Buber
#67. If a man wishes to guide the people in his house the right way, he must not grow angry at them. For anger does not only make one's soul impure; it transfers impurity to the souls of those with whom one is angry.
Martin Buber
#68. If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself out into the light.
Martin Buber
#69. When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man.
Martin Buber
#70. It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.
Martin Buber
#71. The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.
Martin Buber
#72. In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.
Martin Buber
#73. Only men who are capable of saying Thou [an attitude of deep respect] to one another can truly say we with one another.
Martin Buber
#74. Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.
Martin Buber
#75. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
Martin Buber
#76. And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.
Martin Buber
#77. The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one's whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being.
Martin Buber
#78. All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.
Martin Buber
#79. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.
Martin Buber
#80. A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself [only] but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being(s).
Martin Buber
#81. Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.
Martin Buber
#82. Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.
Martin Buber
#83. Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.
Martin Buber
#84. To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.
Martin Buber
#85. The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.
Martin Buber
#86. God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?
Martin Buber
#87. One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.
Martin Buber
#88. One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.
Martin Buber
#89. God cannot be seen, but He can listened to and spoken to!
Martin Buber
#90. This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself.
Martin Buber
#91. We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.
Martin Buber
#92. The true meaning of love one's neighbor is not that it is a command from God which we are to fulfill, but that through it and in it we meet God.
Martin Buber
#93. Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
Martin Buber
#94. An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Martin Buber
#95. But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And 'with' the world, I don't mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points in which the world can meet man.
Martin Buber
#96. Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.
Martin Buber
#97. You should carefully observe the way toward which your heart draws you, then choose this way with all your strength.
Martin Buber
#98. True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.
Martin Buber
#99. We should also pray for the wicked among the peoples of the world; we should love them too.
Martin Buber
#100. The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).
Martin Buber
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
